Cornell Prof. Launches Cryptocurrency Backed by Major VCs

Emin Gün Sirer, co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts at Cornell University and renowned blockchain researcher, is launching ‘Ava’, his own new cryptocurrency.

Ava Labs, Sirer’s startup, raised $6 million for the project earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, Sirer’s project has already managed to secure funding from “some of the biggest venture capitalists in the field,” including, Polychain, and Metastable.

Ava Labs Exits Stealth, Launches Blockchain Testnet Based on ‘Avalanche’ Protocol via

— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor)

A test version of the network will be debuted on Thursday, May 23rd; the public issuance of the coin will take place within the next several months.
According to Sirer, the Ava network will act as a high-throughput platform with fast transaction confirmation times–as many transactions per second as the Visa network, with 1.35 second confirmed latency.
Ava Will Be Reportedly Capable of Supporting Apps, Tokenizing Assets
The network’s purported high-throughput capabilities will make a variety of applications possible, ranging from supply-chain tracking to (such as gold.)
 
Sirer’s ultimate vision for Ava is for the network to act as the infrastructure to digitize all financial and asset-ownership systems: “Every certificate will one day be represented on the blockchain,” said Sirer in an interview with Bloomberg. “Every dollar bill. We are trying to create the correct foundation for making that vision happen.”
 

So many academics forget that our goal, as a profession, is *not* to publish papers. It’s to change the world.

— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor)

 
Ava Labs is also the developer of the Avalanche protocol, a distributed method of transaction verification that Sirer says is more flexible than the Bitcoin protocol.
“You can create a digital asset on top of Ava, a coin X,” Sirer told Bloomberg. “And then you can say, I want my coin to support Bitcoin transactions as well as Zcash –- you can mix and mash features from different languages. And I want these features to be supported on this set of nodes.”